Meander Medical Centre

Case

Paul Bauwens, IT Architect of the Meander Medical Centre, sees more and more suppliers provide support for healthcare applications and/or medical equipment at the hospital every year. Currently, there are more than 80 suppliers. These suppliers require access to the hospital network in order to provide support. Every suppliers uses his own remote support tool or VPN connection for this.

"You have to know who is providing the maintenance, because the hospital is responsible for ensuring that only qualified employees provide maintenance to healthcare applications and medical devices.

"Furthermore, the NEN7510 standard for information security in healthcare requires us to have control over who has access to our sensitive personal data. We simply cannot permit ourselves to have any data leak incidents."

VPN connections are easy for Meander to set up in the new infrastructure; however, they are associated with a high management burden and are expensive due to the highly qualified personnel that is required. The VPN connections are difficult to audit as to when they were used, let alone what took place during such a session. The firewall must be partially opened for suppliers' remote support tools. This results in a direct security risk, which cannot be controlled.

Solution

It was clear to Paul that this situation could not remain as is.

"Suppliers must obtain access to the network in a secure manner, and the audits need to be saved in our own network."

Upon examination, Paul quickly came to the conclusion that Bomgar is the only player on the market with a specific solution for supplier access (Embassy, which saves all audit trails behind its own firewall, which means that data never leaves the in-house network). The Bomgar Embassy solution is as secure, controllable multi-platform access solution for suppliers. The Meander Medical Centre comprehensively tested Bomgar for several months.

"Bomgar is the only solution that has control over the entire platform and that stores the data in its own environment; Bomgar is far superior to the rest. Bomgar allows us to monitor who has access to a certain PC or server at any given time. More than 75 different access rights can be configured."

"The standard reports already meet many of a hospital's needs from the security standpoint."

Bomgar offers a licence based on simultaneous users. The number of PCs or servers to be acquired and suppliers that you grant access to is unlimited. There is no limitation in functionality and there are no additional modules. This is a real all-in licence. It offers you the option of starting small and slowly scaling up as use increases an the platform is hence a success.

Currently, the Meander Medical Centre has blocked access to other remote support tools and use of Bomgar for remote support is mandatory for suppliers in the ICT purchasing conditions.

The Future

In the future, use of Bomgar will likely be expanded by suppliers to include resolution of incidents. This will ensure that the service provision will be quickly restored and the customer will experience minimal inconvenience from the incident. Later, the ICT help desk might also join up, and integration with the ITSM tool is needed.

"Bomgar offers a wealth of functions and expansion options as you grow. During the roll-out we consciously chose to focus on what was truly important and decided to expand later on."

In the meantime, the administrators have also become enthusiastic about the possibilities offered by Bomgar for in-house support. The Meander Medical Centre will soon start using the Bomgar platform for convenient support of an in-house help desk and its own administrators.

"Bomgar supports all relevant platforms. Due to this, the Meander Medical Centre is ready to provide remote support to employees who use mobile devices when the Meander Medical Centre rolls out mobile cloud services".

"We have already received enthusiastic reactions from suppliers who will be using our Bomgar portal."

Optimise IT Costs

Being able to control all access to our network for suppliers from 1 solution reduced our costs drastically.

Manage Risk

We now have full visibility and control over activities performed by suppliers on our network. That rhas reduced the risks involved and gave us the opportunity to be better in control.